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Comment by smcl | Hacker News Reader

Yeah he said you need to clearly label your account as "parody" account if you wanted to do that. Except people got banned even though the followed this new rule. Ethan Klein aka @h3h3Productions clearly labelled his account via a big banner picture, but has been booted off the platform.

Meanwhile I'm continuing to report the pretty explicit racism, homophobia, transphobia I'm seeing in replies to some people I follow and getting the "...we want to let you know that {user} hasn't broken our safety policies..." response. So, it seems the priorities for the (presumably substantially gutted) moderation team aren't hate speech, but rather protecting Musk's feelings

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I'd guess people use various twitter clients, and not all of them can show the banner clearly enough. Makes sense to require written text.

And I wouldn't complain too much about whatever is happening in the next few weeks. It's a transition period and not particularly meaningful - can't really tell if any one incident is due to deliberate policy, understaffing, work in progress or evolving goals.

Didn’t they restrict AOC’s account cause she criticized Musk? I don’t think that could be chalked up to “transition period.”

> I'd guess people use various twitter clients

They don't. Twitter reigned that back in many years ago.

In fact Dorsey's new BlueSky project is a return to the early days of Twitter where they provide an API and let anyone build clients.

There are still a few people who use third party clients. I personally Twitter's found iOS app to be annoying (I forget in what specific way) so ages ago I switched to Tweetbot. That said, I really don't think what got Ethan banned was a concern over accessibility.

Is there's a reason he's just not using Mastodon?

> via a big banner picture

I guess that doesn't appear in the feed though?

Does "clearly label your account" mean "choose some way to display that you are a parody account" or does it mean "there's a checkbox labeled 'parody' that you must check if you are a parody account"?

There is no such checkbox

It's quite clear that it means "whatever Elon Musk wants it to mean at any given moment in order to maximize utility for Elon Musk at the expense of his critics".

I don't think that Elon is self consistent enough to have an utility function.

without taking sides, I want to point out that the banner is not a viable way to label things since blind people for example can't access the text.

Or bots for that matter (which might be more relevant here)

The irony is that apparently Musk fired twitter's accessibility team

This shouldn't be downvoted, it's true (see [0]) and does undermine any claim that ethan's banning was out of a concern for the visually impaired.

[0] https://twitter.com/gerardkcohen/status/1588584459779321857

and someone might have a bad sense of humor too!

I saw one of the Ethan Klein tweets, and it was not immediately apparent as parody without clicking through to his account. Someone scrolling through their timeline can't see a user's bio or banner picture, it just looked like an Elon Musk tweet with a blue checkmark (except for the incorrect @).

It looks like they are moving to address this by making the blue check tied to a specific name, which makes a lot of sense. If someone wants to change their display name, they can go through reverification, which should also fix the preexisting issue of blue check accounts getting hacked and used for scams.

> it was not immediately apparent as parody without clicking through to his account

The tweet in question:

"Even though Jeffrey Epstein committed horrible crimes, I do still miss him on nights like this for his warmth and comradery. Rest In Peace old friend"

Parody is usually identifiable by its content, not because someone has to put a big "[WARNING: PARODY]" tag at the top.

The issue is impersonation and confusion, not parody. A significant fraction of the population, especially infrequent Twitter users, are not aware of the display name vs. handle distinction. So if someone has a blue check, the same profile picture, and the display name of another user, they are creating confusion about the source of the statement in question.

With the Onion or the Babylon Bee, they are "reporting" crazy-sounding stories with their own name and account, and thus with their attached reputation as established satire sites. That's an important distinction, in my opinion.

> it just looked like an Elon Musk tweet with a blue checkmark (except for the incorrect @).

Honestly this should have been the bannable offense. The checkmark was meant to guaranteed that you are who your claims to be (without having to check the @ on a side channel). If you intentionally use it for deceit then what is the point?

Personally I dislike both Musk and Twitter, but I hope (and also doubt) that Twitter keeps an adequate level of user verification for the checkmarks.

I believe that is what they are actually banning people for, "impersonation", as they are using a verified account to do a more convincing impersonation of another verified account.

The easiest option in my opinion would be to force verified users to submit tickets for display name changes, or warn them that they will have to reapply for verification when they try to change their display name and remove it. Musk sounds like he is choosing the latter.

>The checkmark was meant to guaranteed that you are who your claims to be (without having to check the @ on a side channel). If you intentionally use it for deceit then what is the point?

The point is that it's now possible to simply purchase a checkmark for $8.00/mo with no identity verification involved. So the checkmark is now unfit for any purpose besides impersonating other accounts. Which is why everyone is using it to shit on Elon Musk.

this is a parody post, you are expected to laugh in 3... 2... 1... liftoff!

What if your legal name is Elon Musk. Can you pay the $8 to be verified? Will there only be one unique verified name and if so who gets to "own" it? If I get verified then someone has a hit song with my same name do I lose verification because they are now more important than me?

Musk seems unhinged as this point.

I absolutely love how he trapped them by fine print. Wonder how many of them will beg his forgiveness.

Some of the “jokes” they tried to pull off should probably get them cancelled from all platforms.

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